vi Preface
and Dostoevsky) had little to do with bioethics. Juan Carlos Siurana
Aparisi, the director of the research group, drew my attention to the fact
that Nietzsche’s stance on suicide was almost unexplored by bioethicists.
I began looking for Nietzsche’s remarks on suicide in his writings and
posthumous fragments. What struck me immediately was Nietzsche’s
joyous and almost poetical conception of free death. e possibility of
conceiving death dierently, that is, as a festival was something new for me.
I left Spain in 2010. At the time, I had two main concerns: to nd a
post-doc position and to work on the English translation of my disserta-
tion. I temporarily set aside my interest on the topic of suicide and
devoted myself completely to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. It was an inter-
national conference on Kant and Nietzsche, held in 2012in Lisbon, that
gave me the occasion to work again on the philosophy of suicide. From
that moment, suicide has been, somewhat intermittently, one of my main
topics of research. e idea of writing this book occurred to me some
years later, when I noticed that there was a l rouge that linked Kant’s,
Schopenhauer’s, Nietzsche’s, and Wittgenstein’s views of suicide. I will
motivate my choice to place these four philosophical perspectives on sui-
cide side by side in the Introduction, so that there is no need to dwell on
it here.
Some chapters of this book are based on material previously published
in P. Stellino, “Nietzsche on Suicide”, Nietzsche-Studien, 42 (2013):
151–177, and in P.Stellino, “Kant and Nietzsche on Suicide”, Philosophical
Inquiry, 39/2 (2015): 79–104. Although in both cases I heavily reworked
their content for this book, I would like to thank both journals for per-
mission to revise and reuse these publications.
My research particularly beneted from the works of three specialists
on the philosophy of suicide: Margaret P.Battin, Héctor Wittwer, and
Michael Cholbi. Wittwer’s book Selbsttötung als philosophisches Problem:
Über die Rationalität und Moralität des Suizids particularly helped me at
the initial stage of my research to understand the complexities of the dif-
ferent arguments that are put forward in the debate concerning the ratio-
nality and morality of suicide.
Lisbon PaoloStellino
23 April 2020